On June 24th, Marc Poirette proudly announced that the PureOS 5.0 Linux operating system is available for download. Powered by Linux kernel 3.3.6 and based on the latest Debian Testing packages, PureOS 5.0 comes now with the GNOME 3.4.2 desktop environment, providing both GNOME Shell and GNOME Classic desktop sessions.

On June 28th, Canonical announced that the second Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system is now available for download. Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2 is now powered by the Linux kernel 3.5.0-2.2 packages, based on the Linux 3.5 RC4 kernel upstream release, and the latest development version of the upcoming GNOME 3.6 desktop environment.

The following important filesystem utilities have been updated in Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2: e2fsprogs 1.42.4, mdadm 3.2.5, autofs 2012-06-01, and btrfs-tools 2012-03-28. Also, there's now a new version of the ATI video driver. Moreover, the Mozilla Firefox 14.0 Beta web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 14.0 Beta email client were added in this development release of Ubuntu 12.10.

Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2

Download Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2 now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an alpha release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.

On June 29th, Clement Lefebvre announced that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 13 Xfce Edition operating system is available for download and testing. Being based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce is built on top of the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment, it is powered by Linux kernel 3.2, and distributed as a DVD ISO image for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Highlights of Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce:

· Based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS;

· Linux kernel 3.2;

· Xfce 4.10;

· MATE and mintMenu applets;

· Mint Display Manager;

· Artwork improvements;

· Search engines.

Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce

Download Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should not be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.

Other News:

· On June 25th, CodeWeavers announced that the CrossOver 11.2.0 software has been officially released for both Linux and Mac OS X platforms, bringing support for Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010. Based on Wine 1.4.1, CrossOver 11.2.0 comes with lots of general improvements for various applications, as well as support for the upcoming Apple Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) operating system. Read more about it here.

· On June 26th, Google proudly announced that they have unleashed the stable and final version of the Google Chrome 20 web browser for Linux, Macintosh, Windows and Chrome Frame platforms. There's no information about the Google Chrome 20 (the actual version is 20.0.1132.43) web browser, except the fact that it brings a lots of bugfixes and various stability improvements over previous releases. Read more about it here.

· For this week we've posted an 720p HD video clip that showcases the features of the Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce Edition operating system. The video has 7 minutes and 31 seconds, and it was posted by sneekylinux.